


Scientifically Interesting

by Lirillith



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Fade to Black, First Time, M/M, Nonstandard Genitalia, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-29
Updated: 2013-07-29
Packaged: 2017-12-21 18:38:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/903543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirillith/pseuds/Lirillith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos discovers that Cecil isn't as ordinary as he'd appeared up till now.  Not that he minds that much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scientifically Interesting

When he first came to Night Vale, Carlos had considered Cecil both a valuable contact and a reassuring oasis of almost-normality. Thanks to his radio show, he had contact with as many of the town's authorities as anyone seemed able to reach by conventional methods, and a good command of the unconventional-to-Carlos methods for invoking most of the rest, and he was always delighted to help broadcast news of the various threats and oddities Carlos continued to discover no matter how many times he thought there couldn't be more. Sure, Cecil took a lot of strangeness and chaos and danger and eldritch horrors he could never adequately describe for granted, his office attire was deeply weird (an opinion Carlos would later amend: his entire wardrobe was deeply weird,) and sure, his glowing praise of Carlos on the show was unexpected, unusual, and, Carlos worried, possibly a complicated joke he didn't quite get. But he seemed eccentric, not terrifying.

And Cecil did show signs that he knew the world worked differently elsewhere, signs that Carlos had to admit he clung to. _Cecil knows cats aren't supposed to just pop up somewhere and float there forever,_ Carlos would tell himself for comfort. _Cecil knows it's not normal for all the flour in town to turn into snakes._ He didn't just take for granted, like the allegedly-secret police did in the rare, furtive exchanges Carlos had with them, that people were going to die of mysterious causes on a regular basis; he knew Cecil mourned his interns, although he also kept hiring them. Unlike some of the citizens, Cecil was an average height for an adult man of his apparent age, with limbs and digits of average length and no more joints than expected, and when he removed his gas mask, he had the standard allotment of facial features. His glasses, which he'd happily allowed Carlos to try on one time when they were having coffee, suggested he was badly nearsighted, but they didn't appear to look out on a blurry-to-Carlos parallel universe or display the future or anything. He was... well, Carlos had learned not to use words like "normal" out loud too often, since some people around here took offense and others didn't seem to know what it meant, but he was definitely reasonably close to Carlos's version of ordinary.

After a year in Night Vale, of course, Carlos considers Cecil quite a bit more than a valuable contact and an oasis of normality, but he's still those things too.

Cecil does laundry, even if he's as likely to complain about a previous user leaving a gelatinous mass in the washer as about people who don't show up in a timely fashion to retrieve their clothes. Cecil shops at Ralph's. Cecil helped Carlos set up the bloodstones in his apartment (Carlos had decided it was the only way to find out how they were assembled) and it was eerily similar to putting together a desk from Ikea. Cecil drinks liquids and eats food, although he likes Subway far more than Carlos considers wise. And Cecil's apartment is reassuringly mundane, Carlos has found, as long as the neighbors aren't chanting.  It's much better-decorated, at least in the living room, than his own grad-student decor, but Cecil's lived here a long time. And while Cecil is keeping the lights dim this time, Carlos is pretty sure from previous visits and from the amount of making out they've done on the way from front door to bedroom that it's about setting the mood, not concealing chanting eyeless children or fissures in reality or arms growing out of the walls. The carpet has all the signs of being freshly vacuumed, the bed is neatly made, very large, and pleasantly cushiony, and the only arguably peculiar things in the bedroom are the single-occupant-sized bloodstone circle and the framed print that Carlos can't quite focus on.  But it's possible the reason he can't focus on it has something to do with the way Cecil is nibbling on his ear.

They're down to underwear when they finally hit a speed bump.

"Huh," Carlos says, before he can stop himself. He knows he should just leave it at that — it's bad enough to get an expression of bemused surprise the first time your boyfriend removes your boxers — but the words keep tumbling out. "I should have known there'd be something scientifically interesting..." _About dating in Night Vale,_ he means, or possibly, _In your pants, since the rest of you seems perfectly normal,_ but he's finally managed to bring himself to a halt.

Mercifully, Cecil just laughs. "I guess you don't have them. You've never seen them before?" He sounds a little self-conscious, but just a little, like you might when revealing a large birthmark or a scar. Not like his penis is nestled at the center of what appears to be a sea anemone made out of flesh. His own flesh, at least. This is Night Vale; best not to take that kind of thing for granted.

"No," Carlos says, wishing someone could appreciate the depth of understatement involved here. Cecil never will. "No, I can't say I have. So, uh, you have? On other people, I mean?"

Cecil looks kind of coy. "I don't like to talk about my exes... but yes."

"Okay," Carlos says. So it's not unique to Cecil. Of course it's a Night Vale thing. "And you've always... had this?" Cecil nods. "So it's not of recent origin, it's not a risk to your health... do you have a name for them?"

Cecil shrugs. "Appendages? Tentacles?"

"Can I—?"

"Of course," Cecil says, politely, like they're talking about having seconds of dessert. The... tentacles? Tendrils? surrounding Cecil's member do in fact feel just like his skin, warm and soft, and while they're not exactly undulating like he thought at first — at least not right now — they don't seem to just be lying there limply, either. Some are of varying lengths, but the longest are each about the length of a finger. He thinks they may even have "fingerprints," but in the dim light it's hard to be sure. One wraps around his finger, so they seem to be prehensile. He's muttering these observations to himself, he realizes, when Cecil responds with "Uh huh?" in that tone that always means he's stopped following Carlos's meaning and is just listening to his voice. Carlos may never know why someone with a voice like Cecil's seems to enjoy listening to someone who sounds like _Carlos_ talking, but it's endearing, all the same.

The tentacles are relatively evenly spaced in a ring around Cecil's penis and scrotal sac, in amongst his pubic hair. Carlos rolls one back and forth lightly between his finger and thumb and Cecil's in-drawn breath reminds him that he'd rather not completely abandon their plans for the evening. The appendage even seems to be thickening and tumescing in some way, though it remains pliant, and judging by Cecil's breathing, it's clearly very sensitive. There's a part of Carlos — the part that stopped asking why everyone knows about the Sheriff's _secret_ police, and got used to screaming and staring at the sky in terror several times a week, and picking out fresh produce from the cages at Ralph's — that wants to just save the questions for later, but he's never tried to have sex with anyone whose body parts he couldn't name, and he would like to have some idea of what they do and how they work before he proceeds. The problem is how to ask those questions. Very little fazes Cecil, certainly not Carlos's concerns about time and space and seismology, and even things he identifies as odd don't seem to bother him unduly, but Carlos would hate to discover the one exception at a time like this.

He draws back, his mind on that quandary, and then something warm and fleshy wraps around his wrist, and he lets out an embarrassingly high-pitched shriek.

"Sorry!" Cecil blurts out, looking as embarrassed as Carlos feels. The tentacle has retreated; apparently Cecil's extra appendages experience the same kind of shrinkage as a more traditional erection. When not aroused, they just look like a collection of nipples, which is oddly reassuring. "It's involuntary, you know, I just— I liked what you were doing."

"It startled me." This is a good night for understatements. "I didn't mean to, um, scream. They have more reach than I expected." Maybe a foot or so? He hadn't thought to really take note of the position of his hands in advance.

"They can be verrrry stretchy," Cecil says, and Carlos is pretty sure that's a suggestive purr.

Which is a good point. There are a lot of really interesting possibilities here, provided Cecil's anatomy can refrain from sneak attacks. He knows enough about the distinctive penises of the animal kingdom to be philosophical about some tentacles (tentacle-nipples?) now that the surprise has worn off. It's sort of like Cecil just has multiple hands. "How stretchy? Are they always, um, grabby?"

"Not usually quite that grabby, but I _really_ liked what you were doing."

"Yeah?" Carlos can't help smiling, and when Cecil kisses him, he relaxes into it. And manages to stay _mostly_ relaxed when he feels a soft touch on his thigh and a teasing contact on his nipple despite the fact that both Cecil's hands are accounted for, one in his hair and one on his back.


End file.
